Davy Read online

  “Father, bless me and let me go!”

  I screwed up my own courage to speak: “Father, I’m a dead shot with this bow. May I try from one of the roofs?”

  “No, son, no. Wound him and he’ll destroy the village entirely.”

  That wasn’t true and I knew it. A tiger is only a great cat. A cat suddenly hurt will run and not fight at all unless cornered or unable to use his legs. But I also knew it was useless to instruct a priest. I saw Father Fay’s pilgrims kneeling together in the street, in front of the church. In spite of common sense I made one more try: “Father, I promise you, I could place one of these in his eye, I’ve practiced on knotholes at fifty yards—”

  It only annoyed him. “Impossible. And what if the tiger is a messenger of God? I’ll hear no more of that.” He asked Sam: “Is this your son?”

  “My nephew, and like a son. It’s no empty brag, Father. I’ve seen him nail a—”

  “I said I’d hear no more of that! Take the boy’s arrows, sir, and keep them till this is over.”

  Sam had to take them, I had to yield them, both of us with blank faces. The pilgrims were singing.

  The hymn was “Rock of Ages,” which is from Old Time, a commonplace hymn that has survived the centuries when a limitless literature of better music perished. Jerry’s voice amazed me, incredibly clear and sweet — well, I had never heard a trained boy soprano, and never did again until 1 came to Old City of Nuin, where the Cathedral trains them. At the second verse 1 heard someone behind me singing too — Vilet, my good warm Vilet still crying but singing through the sick snuffies and more or less on pitch. I couldn’t sing, nor did Sam, who stood near me holding the arrows loosely in the hand nearest me.

  Down at the far end of the street, above the rear gate which stood as high as the rest of the palisade, about eight feet, down there in the shimmering heat of summer morning we understood there was a face watching our human uncertainties, tawny-pale, terrible and splendid. Across the light gold there were streaks of darker gold, as though between him and ourselves some defensive obstruction still cast the shadow of its bars — and to his eyes, some shadow on our faces too?

  We had known it would come; maybe we had all known it would find us, in our various ways, unready. The pilgrims were all aware of that face at the end of the street, I think, but their music did not falter. Vilet stopped singing, however; I saw Jed lift her hand gently away from his arm, and then he was moving a step or two down the long street. At that moment the tiger’s face dropped out of view.

  “He’s gone,” ViJet said. “See, Jed — he’s gone, I tell you.” She must have known as we all did that the tiger had not gone. Jed did not look now like a man crazily determined to rush into danger. He was smiling, with some sort of pleasure. He had gone only a little way beyond the kneeling, singing pilgrims. Father Delune was praying silently, his old hands laced together below his chin; I think he was watching Jed, but did nothing to detain him.

  Nor could I, nor Sam. We were all in a way paralyzed, alone, not hearing each other, watching the empty spot at the end of the street, the blind gray-brown of weathered logs and tropic green of forest beyond. Jed’s face was pouring sweat as it had done the day before on the road. A tremor shook his hands and legs as if the earth were vibrating under him, yet he was going on, slowly, as one sometimes journeys in the sorrowful or terrifying or seeming-ludicrous adventures of a dream.

  The tiger soared in an arc like the flight of an arrow, over the gate and into the village.

  The tiger paused for a second, his eyes surveying, calculating lines of attack and retreat, measuring with a cat’s wonderful swift cleverness. Jed made no pause but walked on clumsy and brave, disregarding or not hearing the two priests who now called after him in horror to come back. Jed was holding his arms spread wide, as Father Delune had done when praying at the front gate, but Jed seemed more like a man groping for direction in the dark.

  The tiger ran flowingly toward us along the hot street, not in a charge at first, but a rapid trotting run with head high, like a kitten advancing in sheer play, mimic attack. I suppose he could not have expected to see a human being walk toward him with those queer forbidding outspread arms. He rose on his hind legs in front of Ted and tapped at him with one paw. The motion seemed light, playful, downright absurd. It sent Jed’s massive body twisting and plunging across the street to crash against the gatepost of a house and lie there at the foot of it disembowelled, in a gush of blood.

  The tiger did charge then, a tearing rush so swift that there was time to hear a woman scream only once; then I saw the green fire of his eyes blazing full on us while his teeth fumbled an instant and closed in Jerry’s back. Jerry’s mother screamed again and lunged at the beast with little helpless hands. A swing of his head evaded her without effort. He was trotting off down the street the way he had come, head high again, Jerry’s body in his jaws seeming no bigger than a sparrow’s. He was over the gate and into the wilderness, the woman silent but tearing her pilgrim’s gown to slash at her breasts and then beat her fists in the dust of the road.

  I had snatched one of the arrows from Sam’s hand. I remember having it on the string when the tiger was running away down the street, and a black thing crashing against me which was Father Delune snatching my ann so that the arrow flew useless over the rooftops. He may have been right to do it.

  Moments later Sam and Father Fay and I were with Vilet, who was fumbling at fed’s body as if there were some way she could make it live. “Mam Sever,” Father Fay said, and shook her shoulder, and glanced back at the other woman who needed him — but Father Delune and the older pilgrim women were helping Jerry’s mother into the church. “Mam Sever, you must think of yourself.”

  She crouched on her heels glaring up at us. “You could’ve stopped him, the lot of you. You, Davy, I told you to stop him! Oh, what am I saying?”

  “Likely we are all to blame,” said Father Fay. “But come away now. Let me talk to you.”

  Sam’s hand on my shoulder was taking me away too. We were in some partly enclosed place, the doorway of a shop I think, and Sam was talking to me, bewildering me more than ever, for it was something about Skoar. He shook me to get me out of my daze. “Davy, will you listen once? I’m saying it was just near-about fifteen years past, and one of them so’t of average places—”

  “You said ‘Davy.’ ”

  “Ayah, one of them medium places, not fancy but I mean, not so bad neither, can’t fetch back the name of the street — Grain — no—”

  Part of me must have been understanding him, for I know I said: “Mill Street?”

  “Why, that was it. A redhead, sweet and — nice, someway, nothing like them beat-up—”

  “So God damn you, you flang her a little something for your piece and walked out, that what you mean?”

  “Davy, a man at such a place — I mean, you don’t anyhow get acquainted before you’re obliged to go, nor the girl she don’t want to know you, come to that. And still and all, maybe you get to know as much as you do in some marriages, I wouldn’t wonder.” He would not either let go my shoulders or look at me, only staring over my head, waiting for me. “I been married — still am, come to that. Wife down Katskil way that damn-nigh talked me to death. But the little redhead at that Skoar place-I mean, half an hour of one night and then it’s ‘On your way, fella!’ — and me with never a notion I could’ve left a package behind. Which maybe I didn’t, Davy, we wouldn’t ever know for sure. But I was thinking, I’d like for it to be so.”

  “I dunno why I spoke to you like that.”

  “Still sore?”

  “No.” I have never cried since that morning, but I’m inclined to think that, once in a great while, tears are useful to the young. “No. I a’n’t sore.”

  “So supposing I am your Da — is it all right?”

  “Yes.”

  18

  The January rains fall more steadily here on the island Neonarcheos than any we remember. For two weeks we h
ave been unable to work at clearing new ground. Nickie is uncomfortable in pregnancy and so is Dion — I mean that like me he is trying to give birth to a book, setting down what he can recall of the history of Nuin before it fades or becomes distorted in his mind. We do have paper now: the brookside reeds yield a course product to our primitive methods that takes our lamp-black ink reasonably well.

  From lamp-black my mind jumps to lamps and lamp-oil. When the casks of seal oil we brought in the Morning Star have been exhausted we’ll have no more. We can worry away at native vegetable oils and waxes, and when our sheep have increased there will be tallow to renew the sup.ply of candles. Lambing time in a couple of months wifi be a major event. Of course, Nickie and I seldom object to going to bed early.

  Lamps, candles, animal husbandry — we have enough problems on that level to keep our people busy a hundred years, if there’s that much time. There may not be. We needn’t suppose that because we were the first in centuries to sail the great sea, our enemies won’t follow — soon, perhaps. They have as much courage of the simple kind as we have, or they couldn’t have won the war of the rebellion in spite of their superior numbers. True, it called for the imagination of Sir Andrew Barr, the knowledge in old books forbidden, the orders and protection of Dion as Regent of the richest and strongest of the nations, and the labor of many hands, to create the schooner Hawk and later the Morning Star. Salter’s victorious army had no such vessels to send in pursuit of us, no men capable of handling them. However, given the spark, they might build something capable of venturing out, if the Church would relax her prohibitions.

  We carried with us all designs and working drawings made by our own people. The lower grade workmen had at first only a dim idea of what sort of ship they were engaged in building, but some of them will remember details, and all of them will talk if Salter wants them to. The Holy Murcan Church, up to now, has hogtied itself in this matter, committed to the doctrine that it is morally wrong, offensive to God, to sail out of sight of the land except by what fishermen call the relay system — one vessel holding in sight another which keeps the land within view. Even Dion could not have safely ordered such a ship as the Hawk without explaining to the churchmen that it was needed to overawe the Cod Islands pirates, and would never sail beyond those islands. And the Morning Star, he told them, was needed as a replacement — well — hm-ha — an insurance against a possible regrouping by those Satanic men.

  It’s not merely that it would annoy the Almighty to see a man damn-fool enough to fall off the edge of a flat earth; there’s the larger doctrine, that any important kind of curiosity is wrong, a doctrine all religions of the past have been obliged to uphold as the only practical defense against skepticism. Still, theological obstacles are notoriously movable: if the Church knew we were safely ashore out here, a handful of escaped Heretics living in hard work and happiness on islands that could be valuable, I am certain that God’s blessing on a punitive expedition could be almost instantly arranged.

  Our military intelligence learned beyond a doubt that ex-pirates from the Cod Islands were scattered through Salter’s army. They don’t know big ships but they know the sea; in the old days before 327, when we had to knock them apart as a nation, their lateen-rigged skimmers may have ventured farther than we suppose. They could handle a large vessel for Salter if he ever managed to build one.

  The Cod Islands people-the pirates and their women and slaves and followers — worshiped Satan, the old dark horned god of witchcraft ancient and modern. I’m sure they still do secretly. Likely they considered Old Horny a logical opponent of the existing order of things which they had no reason to love — besides, orgies are fun. The fact that Dion as Regent refused to permit wholesale burning of the Cod Islands people after the pirates’ surrender was one of the most serious grievances the hostile section of the Nuin public, as well as the Church, held against him. The islands were taken over by respectable fishermen’s guilds and added to the province of Hannis; the rank and file of outlaws and exiles and their women and children were allowed to disperse under a general amnesty. Since we hoped to abolish slavery altogether in Nuin and weren’t inclined to set up a mess of new jails, I don’t know what else in logic we could have done. I remember warning Dion that most of the pirates were not going to be grateful more than five minutes, and that the Church wasn’t about to recognize any kind of mercy except its own. He knew that, but went ahead anyhow — and I suppose Niche and I would have given him hell if he had changed his mind as a result of our cautions. Four years later, there the jolly pirates were, in Salter’s army of the rebellion, ready and eager to fight on the Church’s side against the man who had saved them from broiling by that same Church.

  Incidentally I think Dion’s insistence on amnesty instead of vengeance was the first occasion in modem times when a secular ruler has held out against Church pressure and got away with it for as long as four years. In the days of Morgan the Great the question didn’t arise. Morgan was all for the Church, which was new then itself as a definite organization; he was an enthusiast, a warrior for God who could be just as happy converting a human brain as smashing it with a broadax, depending I guess on whether it showed any tendency to talk back.

  And after a while, the Church may not find itself altogether happy with the Morgan dynasty ended and Erinan Salter President. Salter will cancel the preliminary work we did toward getting rid of slavery; he will destroy our small beginning in the development of secular schools, and there’ll be no more sacrilegious talk of relaxing the prohibitions on Old-Time books and learning. But after those matters are dealt with, the honeymoon between Salter and the Church is likely to peter out. Salter is powerhungry, and that is a disease which grows to a climax of disaster as certainly as a cancer. He respects the Church only for the material strength it derives from its power over men’s minds, not for religious reasons and assuredly not for any temporal good the Church may do — (I as one of its sincerest enemies will admit that it does quite a lot). Salter is a practical man in the saddest sense of that term: a man to whom all art is nonsense, all beauty irrelevant, all charity weakness, all love an illusion to be exploited, and all philosophical questions bushwa. I know these things about him, because the fellow tried to get at Dion through me, quite soon after a humorous chance had swept Niche and me into the presidential orbit and made us important. Salter was quite frank about the quality of his mind while he still believed I had a price. He has no convictions, religious, agnostic, atheist or any other — the religious mask is simply one of many to be worn at convenience. When his kind rules, as it sometimes did in Old Time also — sleep on your knife!

  Nay, fair enough — some morning a few years from now we may see on the western ocean the approach of a small clumsy sail…

  Yesterday afternoon Dion wandered in out of the rain with Nora Severn and told us he didn’t want to be Governor. We’ve heard this before, and it makes certain kinds of sense, yet most of us hope he can be talked out of his reluctance. We’ve been kicking around a number of political ideas since at our last general assembly five were chosen to write a tentative constitution as it was done in Old Time, looking toward a day when these islands may hold a population large enough to need the larger formalities.

  “I’m disqualified,” Dion said, “by the very fact that I did govern in Nuin. Autocrat over maybe a million people — absurd, isn’t it, that any man could be in a position like that? I would try, here, and be afraid all the time of old habits rising inside me. Davy, that day eight years ago — when you and Funny-face were sort of swept into office-I think it’s eight years, isn’t it?—”

  “May Day, 323,” said Nickie, and laughed a little.

  “Yes. That day, why do you suppose I was so eager to hang on to you after the Festival of Fools was over? Oh, Nickie turning up when I hadn’t seen her for two years and I’d even thought she was dead — of course. The little twirp was always my favorite cousin. But there was something else in it. I’d begun to distrust myself
already, though I’d been Regent less than a year…”

  I remembered the day. I often do; there’s a brightness in remembering. Nickie and I were twenty, then. We had been living in Old City for two years — obscurely, because Nickie had run away from her family and couldn’t bear the thought of being recognized, knowing the attempts that would be made to draw her back, and how such fuss and uproar would interfere with the work to which she was giving herself body and spirit. Her work was underground, with the Heretics, important and dangerous. Mine, for money-making, was in a furniture factory — Sam Loomis had taught me all he could of joinery when we were with Rumley’s Ramblers — and my other work was to learn, to read the forbidden books under the guidance of Nickie and the Heretics who accepted me because of her, to grow up with a wider understanding of the world I had to live in. She took over, my sweet pepperpot wife, where my substitute mother Mam Laura of the Ramblers had to leave off. Well, but that day, the 29th of April, eve of the Festival of Fools which makes a joyous twenty-four hours of madness for Nuin folk before the gentler delights of May Day — that day Nickie and I were careless. It was the gaiety throughout the city, the reckless delicious urgency of a clear evening of spring, when the sky was piled high with violet-tinted clouds, and there were the street singers, and the flower-girls carried everywhere the scent of lilac.

  We said we’d only go for a short walk, and keep away from the celebration and foolishness. But straying, pausing at a tavern where the beer was rather too good — oh, before long we were asking each other what harm it could do if we merely went for a few minutes to the Palace Square to hear the singing, and maybe watch from a safe place when the King and Queen of the Fools were chosen. And yet Niche has told me since then that all along she had a premonition we were going to be much more scatterbrained than that. I remember how as we drifted toward that part of town, Nickie was trying to determine how accurately she could steer my walking by bumping me with her hip, neither of us using hands or arms, and we arrived at Palace Square in that style — honestly not drunk, just happy.